APA style, developed by the American Psychological Association (APA), is used across many social science disciplines.
For a more in-depth overview of APA style, check out the APA section on our Citing Sources guide.
APA has developed guidelines for citing generative AI such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. You can view their blog post and read it in full, and they are working to incorporate these new guidelines into the full version of the style.
When you are using generative AI or results generated by a large language model, you should treat that as the output of an algorithm, and cite it as such.
That means the company that has created the model, not the model name, should be listed as the author. For instance, if you're citing output for Gemini, Google will be listed as the author. If you're citing something generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI would be the author. Before citing a generative AI, make sure you know what company created it!
Because there is no direct way to link to your conversations with generative AI models, you should incorporate your input text into your written research. You may incorporate this in your methods section, literature review, or the text preceding a citation. Because each session with an LLM or generative AI is unique and provides different responses, you may want to include the full transcript in an appendix of your work as well, although this is optional. If you chose to do so, remember to call out your appendix or other supplemental materials at least once in the body of your written paper.
Because there are constantly evolving versions of these pieces of software, APA recommends that you list your version in your citation, as shown below.
The format for your citation examples can be seen here:
Format:
Author. (Date). Name of tool (Version of tool) [Large language model]. URL
Example:
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
In-Text Citation Example:
(OpenAI, 2023)